Why hello there, and welcome to a rather special Kitchen Catastrophe: It’s not often we have to spend a whole post BUILDING THE COMPONENTS to our recipes, but here we are. In order to acknowledge the Tampa Bay Buccaneer’s appearance in the NFL Championship Game (which I have been told they are QUITE litigious if you use the name without permission, and I’m terrible at paperwork, hence why every year one of the posts turns into an extended round of Taboo) we’re going to make a Tampa Bay Cubano. And maybe SOMETHING MORE… But first, I’ve got to work on the INGREDIENTS. So today, we’re making Bread and roasting pork so that THURSDAY, we can make sandwiches. Everyone wanting to chop the shop talk and zip straight to the chop walk, click this link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

Universally Panned

So the first recipe we have to make is pan cubano, which, even if you don’t speak Spanish, is clearly Cuban in nature, thus the knowledge that it is “Cuban bread” is not a huge surprise. The first step for the recipe I have is to form a sponge, by mixing together equal parts water and all-purpose flour, along with a generous helping of yeast.

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It will look like goo, because it is goo.

Mixed together, this is going to look like pancake batter, and then you’re going to pop it in the fridge for a cold ferment. A cold ferment is when you ferment things while they’re cold. That sounds glib, but it actually serves a purpose: see, the cold slows down the fermentation process, which means the chemical processes going on have more penetrating power. It’s like marinating, but for bread: most people find that a cold-fermented bread simply has more flavor, and a better texture than bread without one…kind of. Notably, the process works better for breads that are intended to have more ‘chew’, like pizza dough.

As such, what’s interesting is that this pan cubano recipe is a hybrid of cold and warm fermentation. We’re making a cold-fermented sponge, letting it cold ferment for 12+ hours, but then, come the next day, we mix it into a dough with MORE yeast, flour, warm water, and fat.

Tragically, I am about to go on a discussion of the fat used, but didn’t take a picture of the bowl WITH the fat visible. There’s this one, and then there’s one with the sponge glomped over it.

The fat in question is lard, though the recipe notes you can use shortening instead. And if you’re squeamish about using lard in your cooking, I’d just like to note that modern culinary science notes that it’s honestly not all that bad. Like, it’s arguably better for you than butter. Sure, it’s weird that you can leave it out without refrigeration, and I’m certainly not going to be spreading lard on my waffles anytime soon except as a gross dare, but as a cooking ingredient, it’s no weirder than shortening, vegetable oil, etc.

Now, the process for making this bread is a weird mix of hands-on and hands-off. Like, once you’ve mixed the lard, sponge, water, yeast and flour, you’re just going to let the stand-mixer knead it for 8ish minutes into a smooth dough. I used this time to get started on the recipe for the mojo pork, and IMMEDIATELY paid for it in suffering, since our stand-mixer loves to wobble itself around the counter while kneading, and ended up smacking the base of my pork cure off the counter.

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Doo do do, do do doo do.

From there, you roll the dough into a ball, pop it in a bowl to proof, and you’ve got 45 minutes to clean up your lost pork cure and remake it. And while we do that, let me talk to you about what exactly is going on with ANY of this, since I accidentally just started riffing with the cold ferment.

So, this is a recipe for pan cubano, which my quick check of sources suggests is an American invention, inspired by the breads of Cuba, but created in Florida. (Probably with a similar genealogy to such hits as “Spaghetti and Meatballs” or “Corned Beef and Cabbage”; the American excess of meat and oil letting the new version be richer than the one it’s based on.) There’s some very ‘classic Americana’ tropes built into the stories I saw: bakeries delivering fresh bread every morning (via a SPIKE next to the front door, which is an amazing addition. I hope everyone had porch covers, or a little rain is RUINING that delivery), old newspaper clipping suggesting that Cuban bread is equal to, if not superior, to the breads of France or Vienna, burned down bakeries that built back better, etc etc.

My concern is that it is also often lauded as the only authentic choice for Cubano sandwiches, and my research of the area showed no one making and selling it around me. (I should say, “No one who advertised it as a regular item.” There are SEVERAL Latin bakeries around, and I’m reasonably sure if I reached out to them and asked, they’d have done it.) Hence why we’re making it now.

Anyway, due to reasons we’ll discuss in a minute, I didn’t actually get to leave while my bread proofed, so let’s get on to the next step. The dough should weigh about 28 ounces, and you’re going to want to split it into two 14 ounce chunks.

Are you fucking kidding me?

The next steps, I BELIEVE I understood, but without visual confirmation, I’m only 90% on that. The insstructions are to work the dough into a 10” by 6” rectangle, and then fold the top and bottom to the mid-line, making what is now a roughly 10” by 3” line.

Like, a flattened hot-dog

THEN fold that over itself (like you’re ‘closing’ the roll) pinch all the edges shut, turn it seam-side down, and…my instructions say “roll it” into a 15 inch loaf, but personally, I found it was easy to do by hand. Then do all of that again with the second ball.

Another 30 minute proof, and it’s ready for baking, which will be done with an unusual component!

(Poorly) Shown Here.

See, we want to catch some of the steam of the bread baking, so for 2/3rds of the baking time, you’d going to keep the pan under this disposable pan, and then you take it off for the last 10 minutes to brown. And boom boom, your bread is done!

BEHOLD. BREAD.

Now, all of this I finished the night before I intended to make the sandwiches, and that’s on purpose. (kind of. I intended to do it the AFTERNOON before, but c’est la vie.) See, the bread and Mojo Pork BOTH take over 12 hours to make, so if you’re planning to make these for Sunday, I recommend you start the sponge and start the pork cure Friday night. (Technically, you could use a less fermented sponge, but I mean, if you’re going to the trouble to make the bread instead of just snagging like, hoagie rolls or French bread, why skimp out there?) BUT, the Bread is also known to go stale VERY fast, so it’s supposed to be used within 3 days of baking (which might be why nowhere near me is selling any…)

Pork Barrel Spending

The next component for the dish is Mojo roasted Pork, which is a very simple recipe that unfortunately has a lot of little PARTS, and a kind of messed-up history. See, here’s the thing about Mojo: it’s not a Cuban word. Nor was it originally a Spanish word. Mojo comes from Portuguese, and Mojo the sauce was first found on the Canary Islands. So, how did it get to Cuba? Well, it’s based on one little map, and a fair bit of misery.

I wonder why this will be important, or if I made the red dot obvious enough.

That is a picture of the standard wind-flow patterns of the Atlantic ocean, with a dot I’ve added to indicate where the Canary Islands are. So Spanish or sometimes Portuguese ships that wanted to sail to the Americas had the easiest time of it by sailing down the coast of Africa, and then across to northern South America and the Caribbean. “That doesn’t sound so bad, Jon. So the Canary Islands were important for Iberian ships going to the New World. Why would that be bad?” And the answer to that is “I see you’ve forgotten what the most important reason for Iberian ships going to the New World was for about 300 years.” CUE THE “OH GOD, THE HORROR” LATIN MUSIC!

I…what? No, I meant, like, “LATIN CHANTING”. THIS WILL NOT TONALLY FIT WITH THE NEXT PARAGRAPH’S TOPIC.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh. So this sauce is kind of tied up with the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Though, according to at least one source, not in as tragic a sense as you might think! Apparently, there was a fair amount of Canarians (the word for “people from the Canary Islands”, because we all knew calling them “Canarys” was never going to fly…damn it.) who chose to emigrate to the Caribbean holdings…because they were more economically stable than the islands at the time, and less likely to be assaulted by other powerful nations. (There were several decades of raids by the Dutch, the Ottomans, and other figures) So the Canarians went to Venezuela, and Cuba, and other Spanish holdings in the area. And the ones on Cuba helped create the Cuba version of Mojo.

Interestingly, one of the best ways to describe how the word mojo works in Spanish is to use a different Spanish loan-word: Salsa. In Spanish, ‘salsa’ just means “sauce”. But in ENGLISH, we tend to use it to refer to like, “variations of salsa cruda, tomatillo salsa, and pico de gallo”. If I said I was making ‘salsa’ and showed up with Mornay sauce, you’d be confused. Mojo is kind of the same: it means “sauce”, but it’s only used to refer to like, 4 sauces that are LIKE the sauces made in the Canary Islands, which is to say, “oil-based, with garlic and herbs”. Indeed, a popular Mexican dish (at least in my area) is “Mojo de Ajo”, a dish of shrimp cooked and tossed in a garlic and herb sauce. CUBAN Mojo (and indeed, a lot of new world mojos) also add a citrus juice. Which is actually something of a problem, and one of the reasons this is not a traditional recipe.

Pro-Tip: This should all be liquid.

Firstly, the citrus juice of choice in Cuba is naranja agria, which I’ve talked about briefly before, but is the juice of the “sour orange”, also known as the “bitter orange”, and a couple other names. It’s a variety of orange with a lot less flesh, and a lot more pith, and as the name implies, it’s more bitter/sour than typical oranges. They’re also called “Seville” oranges, because Spain is like, the number 1 producer of them, and has been for centuries. They’re also called Marmalade oranges, with them being the orange of juice for orange marmalade made in Britian, because they have more pectin, and thus set-up better. They are NOT commonly found in the Pacific Northwest, a fact I learned in my teens, when I had to make Cochinita Pipil, a Mexican slow-roasted pork dish that also uses the sauce. If you can’t find it, the typical recommendation I’ve seen is to mix together orange and lime juice, with different people giving different ratios to ‘nail’ the flavor.

The second reason is acidity: often, when using acid in a marinade, you end up going for a shorter time, as the acid can denature the proteins, essentially ‘cooking’ the meat. And Cook’s Country (whom I am taking all the recipes this week from) found that using the juice for the marinade ended up overly affecting the meat, leaving it chewy. Hence this mixture of brown sugar and salt, which creates a dry-brine to salt the pork over-night. By using the same components (orange zest, lime zest, salt, pepper, garlic) but keeping them in their dry form, you can imbue the same (or at least very similar) flavors into the meat without worrying about that denaturing effect.

Now, the recipe calls for 5 pounds, boneless pork shoulder with a fat cap. I could not find that, so I instead bought 7.2 pounds, bone-in, with a nice little layer of fat on one side, and boned the shoulder myself. I have no pictures of the process, since it takes both hands and it was like, 10 PM when I was doing this, but it’s probably easier than you THINK, while also a little harder than you hope: You really are just kind of wedging a knife next to the bone, and cutting around it. Eventually, you’ll get it out, hopefully without too much meat on it. Mine was about 1 lb.

It was covered in meat, and looked like someone tried to make a cartoon heart out of steak.

Then you trim the rest of the pork, getting the fat layer down to around ¼” if it looks thicker anywhere, cutting out any silverskin you think you left in the meat when you cut out the bone. Any weird little nubs. I went a little aggressive, since I knew I could lose up to a whole pound of the roast, and honestly, I still ended up with 5 lbs and 12 ounces. Rub it with the mixed up dry-brine, wrap the whole thing in plastic wrap, pop it on a large plate (so that if any of the liquid oozes out, it doesn’t cover everything in your fridge, and walk away for 12 hours. After which time, it will look like this.

Pale and grimy.

That goes in a large Dutch oven (a type of cooking pot) with just 2 cups of water, lid on, and into a 325 degree oven for 3ish hours. Which…is where we are right now, so I can’t actually finish the post yet. So I’m going to wander off for a couple hours, get the rest of the ingredients ready, and I’ll meet you back here to make mojo in…2 hours or so.

Alright, it is MUCH later than that, but that’s because things got crunched for time. I had forgotten (or not been told, a fairly common occurrence) that my mother had to go back into work for a briefing this evening, so we had to go straight from “pork is done” to “make these suckers RIGHT NOW.” Which lays the groundwork for Thursday, but let’s wrap up today first. So, after about 3 hours of cooking, the pork should look like this

Pale and SLIMY.

And it should temp somewhere around 170 degrees Fahrenheit. At which point you take the lid off, and pop it back in for another 45 minutes to 1 hour 45 minutes. The point is to get some nice color on the top of the pork, and to raise the internal temp to around 190-200.

Pop it out, and let it sit on a cutting board for 45 minutes. This is to let the temp even out. It will look, and taste, pretty spectacular, in my opinion.

Pulled and primed-y.

It’s salty, sweet, a little funky. You could douse that in a citrus-y barbecue sauce and make a great pulled pork sandwich. Which is kind of what the mojo is, so let’s whip that up too.

The Mojo is 6 minced garlic cloves, ever so-lightly toasted in oil over low heat, with all the same flavors of the dry-brine (now in actual liquid form) added: the cumin, the salt, the red pepper flakes, the oregano, salt, pepper, orange juice, lime juice, and…pineapple juice. Mix it all together and the mojo is ready! Some people include thinly sliced onion, but I didn’t, which was DEFINITELY INTENTIONAL, and not at all because I forgot to buy onions at the THREE STORES I had to visit during this process. (I got all the ingredients for THESE in one trip, but then I needed ingredients for the sandwich, and we ran out of cat-food…)

Runnin’ Around at the speed of sound!

And that’s where we’ll leave things today. Come back Thursday so we can assemble some sandwiches, and dive a little deeper into their history, and my personal history with them.

THURSDAY: I JUST TOLD YOU.

MONDAY: SHIT, I GOTTA GET READY FOR VALENTINE’S DAY. LUCKILY, I’VE GOT A DISH THAT’S BETTER THAN SEX. OR ROBERT REDFORD. THE JURY IS OUT ON IF IT”S BETTER THAN SEX WITH ROBERT REDFORD, THOUGH.

And now the

Recipes

Cuban Bread

Makes 2 loaves

Ingredients

Sponge

¼ cup water

¼ cup (1¼ ounces) all-purpose flour

½ teaspoon instant or rapid-rise yeast

Dough

3 cups (15 ounces) all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons instant or rapid-rise yeast

1 ½ teaspoons table salt

1 cup warm water (110 degrees)

¼ cup lard

1 (16 by 12-inch) rectangular disposable aluminum roasting pan

Preparation

Make the sponge by stirring together all ingredients for it in a small bowl, or glass measuring cup, and place in the refrigerator at least 6 hours, or up to 24.
To make the dough, mix every other ingredient (except the roasting pan) in a stand mixer with a dough hook: on low for 2 minutes until fully combined and all dry flour is gone, and then increase speed to medium and knead the dough for 8 minutes.
Form into a smooth ball with your hands, and pop into a large greased bowl. Cover with plastic wrap, and let proof until roughly doubled in size, around 45 minutes. In the interim, line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Once proofed, separate the dough into 2 equal chunks.
Working on a floured cutting board or counter, form the first chunk into a 10 inch by 6 inch rectangle, short ends to the right and left. Fold the top edge down to the midline and press it to seal, then fold the bottom edge up to the same line. Fold the top down TO the bottom (folding the entire dough in half) and then pinch the seams and edges shut. Turn the loaf so the seam side is down, shape into a 15 inch loaf with tapered ends, and move to the parchment paper-lined baking sheet. Then repeat all of these steps with the second chunk of dough, placing it so it’s a few inches away from the first loaf.
Cover the dough with plastic wrap, and let proof again for another 30 minutes. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees with the top rack in the middle.
Make a shallow (1/8” or so) cut along the top of each loaf, starting about an inch and a half in, and ending the same distance from the other end. Place the roasting pan upside down over the baking sheet, and pop into the oven. Bake for 20 minutes, remove the roasting pan, and bake another 10-12 minutes, until browned, and roughly 210 degrees in the middle.
Allow to cool for at least 30 minutes before serving.

Dry-Brined Pork with Mojo

Makes like, 4+ pounds.

Pork

⅓ cup kosher salt

⅓ cup packed light brown sugar

1 tablespoon lime zest (2 limes)

1 tablespoon orange zest

3 garlic cloves, minced

2 teaspoons ground cumin

2 teaspoons dried oregano

½ teaspoon red pepper flakes

1 (5-pound) boneless pork butt with fat cap, or larger butt trimmed

Mojo

⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil

6 garlic cloves, minced

⅓ cup pineapple juice

⅓ cup orange juice

⅓ cup lime juice (3 limes)

1 tablespoon yellow mustard

1 ¼ teaspoons ground cumin

1 teaspoon kosher salt

¾ teaspoon pepper

¾ teaspoon dried oregano

¼ teaspoon red pepper flakes

Thinly sliced onion rounds (“optional”)

Preparation

Combine all the ingredients (except the pork). Place the pork on a double-lining of plastic wrap (slightly offset, not just “one on top of another. There is no specific reason for this, and I do NOT have to clean up part of my fridge later), and cover with the dry-brine. Wrap up, place on a plate, and refrigerate for 12-24 hours.
Preheat an oven to 325 degrees, and move the pork butt to a large pot or Dutch oven (removing the plastic wrap), adding 2 cups of water. Place the (oven-safe) lid on, and place in the oven for 2 ½ - 3 hours, until the middle of the butt registers about 170 degrees.
Remove the lid, and cook another 45-105 minutes, until the middle is 190 degrees. Remove from the pot, put on a cutting board, tent with foil, and then rest for 45 minutes.
While pork is resting, make the mojo: in a small saucepan, heat the oil and garlic over low heat for 2-5 minutes, until garlic is lightly toasted and taking on a yellow hue and oil is forming tiny bubbles around garlic. Let cool off heat for 5 minutes, then add the rest of the mojo ingredients and stir to combine.